


Stranger in Paris

by SylvanWitch



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: AU for Harry Potter, Gen, Harry dies in this one, pre-series for Musketeers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 08:29:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17556866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Athos is investigating a kidnapping ring when his surveillance is interrupted by a robed stranger carrying a polished stick.  His day only gets weirder from there.





	Stranger in Paris

**Author's Note:**

> For cornerofmadness on DW, who contributed the following prompt for the 15 Characters meme: _If 3 and 9 had to rescue a group of kids but had to wade through a gauntlet of their worst fears what would the face and would they succeed._ Number three on my list is Athos, number nine Severus Snape.

"Before you rush in with your sword unsheathed, might I suggest we gather intelligence on the adversary? Or are you in the habit of waving that thing about and hoping it strikes true?"

Athos' eyebrow was legendary; there were men for leagues around the Musketeers' garrison who wet themselves in terror of having that arch look fall upon them. It always meant that someone would bleed.

But he'd met his match in the severe, strangely clad man who returned his condescension with an arched eyebrow even more lethal than Athos' own.

Athos' sword lost a little altitude.

"Better," the dark-haired man said in a tone that suggested the opposite of the word itself.

"Who are you?" Athos asked, trying to regain some measure of control over the situation. He'd been minding his own business, loitering outside a discreet brothel where some of the city's finest sported of an evening, hoping to gather information on a kidnapping ring they'd caught wind of.

The robed man had appeared seemingly out of thin air; Athos had felt entirely justified in drawing his weapons. Now, he just felt foolish.

"Who I am is of no consequence. What's important is the location of a man calling himself Aramais. Have you seen a man slightly taller than I with scars on both cheeks and a decided limp?"

Athos had, in fact, seen just such a man entering the brothel only a few minutes before. He said as much to the stranger.

"Did he have anyone with him?"

Yes, and that was much of the reason Athos was skulking in the shadows of a stinking alley rather than storming the house in search of his quarry. The exquisitely appointed woman on his arm had borne an uncanny resemblance to his dead wife. Athos would rather swallow glass than come face to face with that particular nightmare, but he couldn't very well tell the stranger that.

"He's inside, has been for a half-hour or a little more. Why are you seeking him?"

"He's taken something that doesn't belong to him."

"Would that some _thing_ be a some _one_."

The stranger gave a curt nod.

"Then we have a common cause," Athos said, understanding that he had no choice now but to go in, even if it meant confronting his dead wife's doppelganger. Resolved, he raised his sword and pistol once again.

"While the bravado is charmingly muggle, your weapons will do nothing against the man we'll face."

"All men are mortal," Athos scoffed. On this subject, he felt eminently confident.

With a sniff and a dismissive shrug, the man said, "You may enter first, in that case. I have no intention of being run through accidentally."

 _How about on purpose?_   Athos thought.

The actual storming of the house was anti-climactic. There was no one in the front hall or the parlor, and noises from above suggested where the action might be. As they climbed the stairs, there was a shout and then a starburst of green light.

Athos dropped into a crouch and pressed himself against the wall on the upper landing, gesturing that the stranger should likewise take cover.

Instead, he swept past Athos with nary a hesitation, his robes brushing against Athos' arm, making him shudder.

He heard a door open, another shout, closed his eyes as a second, brighter burst of light bathed the upper hallway in sickly green.

Silence reigned, interrupted only by the blood thrumming in his ears. At last, Athos rose and crept around the corner and down the hall, pistol at the ready. When he came to the second door on the right, he saw that it was open, and as he ducked his head around the frame, he caught a glimpse of the stranger standing motionless, two bodies on the floor at his feet.

Athos took care to make a noise, just enough to let the other man know he was there, and it was wise that he did so, for the stranger whirled on him, raising what looked like a slender, polished piece of wood and intoning words in a language that sounded a bit like Church Latin.

When the stranger saw that it was Athos, he dropped his hand and turned to stare again at the second bundle of cloth on the floor, which Athos' eyes reluctantly informed him was a child barely grown out of his awkward middle teens. The boy's black hair was sweaty, sticking to his pale forehead, on which Athos could just make out a scar of some sort. His sightless green eyes were wide open, as though the boy had been surprised by the enormity of his own end.

The second body belonged to Aramais. Of the woman who'd been in his company, there was no sign. The relief he felt was chased away by guilt at feeling any such relief at a time like this.

"The boy...is he your son?"

This time, the stranger looked at him with an expression of such devastating rawness that Athos actually flinched, and it was only with enormous will that he did not look away. Some pain deserved to be witnessed, and it was the least he could do for the man, who seemed strangely vulnerable now, like he had confronted his greatest fear and been found wanting.

"I hated him," the man said. "Because he reminded me of someone I loved very much, and I blamed him, in part, for her death. That blame, my hate--they were not the worst of my sins, but it is for them that I'm condemned now to live in a world where the last I might have had of her is gone."

With those cryptic words, the stranger gathered the boy's body into his arms, awkwardly raised his polished stick, intoned something in that strange not-Latin, and then disappeared.

A few moments later, when Porthos and Aramis burst into the room, Athos couldn't tell them how he came to be here nor how the kidnapper had come to be dead without an apparent mark on him. He was left only with an uneasy sense that something vital had gone out of the world, a feeling he drove ruthlessly away later that night with a bottle of wine and the company of his bosom friends.


End file.
